ABOS Part II Exam Week: A Complete Schedule for Candidates and Families

By the time exam week arrives, the work is done. Your case selectors have assigned your twelve cases. Your case summaries are submitted. The material you know is the material you know. What's left is logistics, sleep, and composure — and getting those three things right matters more than candidates expect.

This is a day-by-day schedule for exam week. It's designed around a single principle: the goal this week is not to learn new material — it's to arrive composed and rested. Every decision should serve that goal.

The Guiding Principles

Before we walk through the days, five rules that govern the entire week:

1. No cramming. Trying to learn new topics in the final 72 hours increases anxiety without moving the needle on performance. You're past the point of adding knowledge. You're now optimizing delivery.
2. Protect sleep. Sleep is the single highest leverage variable this week. Every other decision — when you eat, when you stop reviewing, when you travel — should be made to protect it.
3. Protect routine. Exam week is the wrong week to try a new workout, a new restaurant, or a new sleep schedule. Keep everything as familiar as possible.
4. No alcohol the night before. Not one drink. Alcohol fragments sleep architecture and you need every REM cycle you can get.
5. Eliminate friction. Know exactly where you're eating, where you're getting coffee, how you're getting to the exam. Day-of surprises are preventable and they cost composure.

Saturday: Arrival Day

Travel in a day early. Flying in the morning of the day before the exam is fine in theory and a disaster in practice — cancellations, delays, and lost luggage are not risks you absorb this week. Fly Saturday if the exam is Monday.

When you land, check into the hotel. Then do three small things: walk the route from your hotel to the exam venue, find the coffee shop you'll use tomorrow morning, and confirm where you're eating dinner. That's it. You're building a physical map so that nothing on exam day requires decision-making.

Saturday evening is for light review only. Flip through your case summaries. Glance at your images. Do not open a textbook. Do not start a new topic. If a gap jumps out at you, write it on a sticky note and make peace with the fact that you're not going to close it this weekend.

Go to bed early. Not exam-night early — just an hour before your normal bedtime so you're not lying awake on Sunday night wishing you were sleeping.

Sunday: The Cap

Sunday is the last day you touch your cases. Treat it like a walk-through, not a study day.

Morning: go through your twelve cases out loud, one time. Not reading them — presenting them. Use the images. Practice pulling up the PDFs and navigating between them the way you will on exam day. This is your final rehearsal, and it should feel familiar, not frantic. If you've been practicing for the last two months, this rep is a confidence builder. If you're doing it for the first time Sunday morning, the problem is upstream of this schedule.

Afternoon: hard stop. Close the laptop. Go for a walk. Call someone who makes you laugh. Do anything that is not studying. The temptation to squeeze in one more review session is real, and it's the wrong instinct. Your brain needs to consolidate, not cram.

Early dinner — 6:00 or 6:30 — at a restaurant you know won't upset your stomach. Nothing adventurous. No shellfish roulette. Skip the wine.

Sleep protocol: be in bed by 9:30 with the lights out by 10:00. Set two alarms. Put your phone on airplane mode. If your brain starts spinning, do not reach for your case summaries — that guarantees an hour of lost sleep. Instead, accept that you're not going to fall asleep immediately, breathe slowly, and let your body rest even if your mind is busy. Physical rest still counts.

Exam Day: Monday

Wake up 90 minutes before you need to leave. Not earlier — you don't want to sit in a hotel room ruminating. Not later — you don't want to rush.

Eat something familiar. Protein plus a complex carb. Not a giant breakfast. Not coffee alone. If you always eat oatmeal and a banana, eat oatmeal and a banana. Exam day is not the day to discover you're sensitive to the hotel's breakfast sausage.

Get coffee at the place you scouted on Saturday. Walk to the venue. Arrive 20-30 minutes early. Use the bathroom — use the bathroom at every break, all day. Physical discomfort is a composure tax you can't afford.

Once the exam begins, your job is to present the case summaries you submitted. Remember that the summary structure is the presentation — you're walking the examiners through a document they already have in front of them. Pull up your PDFs on the computer. Get the next case's images queued on the big screen before you need them. Small logistical fluency signals preparedness.

Between sessions, reset. A bad answer in one period has zero bearing on the next period unless you carry it forward. Go to the bathroom. Wash your hands. Take three slow breaths. Do not replay the last session. The candidates who pass are the ones who treat each period as a fresh exam. For more on this, see our piece on training composure.

Monday Evening: Decompression

When the exam is over, it's over. You will want to do a forensic review of every question you flubbed. Resist that. Nothing you think or feel tonight changes the outcome, and post-mortems the day of the exam are almost always inaccurate — candidates consistently underestimate how they did.

Have a nice dinner. Have a drink if you want one. Call the person who has been holding things down at home. Go to bed at a reasonable hour. Fly home the next day, not the same night — you're running on adrenaline and you don't need to add airport stress to the back end of this week.

For Families: How to Support Without Adding Pressure

If your spouse or partner is taking the ABOS Part II this week, the most useful thing you can do is reduce load, not ask questions. Here's what actually helps:

• Handle the domestic operating system. Kids, meals, laundry, bills, appointments. Not as a favor — as a fact. This week, those things are your job, full stop.
• Don't ask how prep is going. They know how it's going. The question is a pressure test even when it's meant kindly. If they want to talk about it, they'll bring it up.
• Protect the routine. Same bedtime. Same coffee. Same morning run if that's what they always do. Novelty is the enemy this week.
• Don't schedule anything. No dinners with friends. No family visits. No difficult conversations. All of that waits until next week.
• Express confidence, not pressure. “I know you're ready” is supportive. “I really hope you pass” is a weight. Calibrate accordingly.

For a deeper look at the partner role, see our guide on supporting a spouse through ABOS Part II.

What You're Really Doing This Week

You've been studying for months. Your twelve cases are chosen. Your summaries are submitted. The examiners are going to ask what they're going to ask, and you're going to answer the way you've practiced answering.

This week isn't about knowledge. It's about delivery. The candidates who perform best on exam day are almost never the ones who studied hardest in the final 72 hours. They're the ones who slept well, kept their routine, managed their logistics, and walked into the room calm. That's a schedule problem, not a studying problem.

For more on the final 24 hours specifically, see the night before the ABOS Part II. For a detailed walkthrough of the exam day itself, see exam day logistics.

Get the schedule right and the rest of the week takes care of itself.